People tend to regard the gradual yet irreversible atrophying of their faculties as a bad thing. Is it, though? Sure, it’s tied up with stuff that you don’t want to think too much about. One day, you learn that you can’t hear a sound that is perfectly audible to teen-agers and dogs. (Any significance in that symmetry, by the way? Do we feel diminished as a species because dogs can hear a noise that we can’t?) Soon after that, you realize that you have forgotten how to calculate the area of a triangle, and how many pints there are in a quart. From there, it’s not long until you find that you are unable to stop talking about real estate, which is the first step down an increasingly rocky and overgrown path that leads, almost always—all right, always—to death. What is there to like about any of this?
A lot it seems. Read the whole comment by Louis Menand at The New Yorker